Thursday, December 3, 2015

A few days ago, in a post entitled “The Gods Are Angry” I
likened the climate change movement to a pagan cult. I identified California
Governor Jerry Brown as a medicine man—I might have said, high priest—of this
cult, someone who is telling us that we need to make sacrifices to propitiate
the gods… lest they visit unspeakable harm on the human species.

Upon finishing my post I chanced on Joel Kotkin’s far more
comprehensive analysis of the career of the same Jerry Brown. Kotkin also sees
the environmental movement as a form of religion, though he compares Brown to
Torquemada, the grand inquisitor during the Spanish Inquisition.

I am not overly worried about the possibility of mixing up
the different religious traditions. One might well say that the inquisitions
and witch hunts were vestiges of a suppressed paganism that has reared its head
at various times in the history of Judeo-Christianity.

Of course, Kotkin is far better informed than I about the
activities of Jerry Brown and he offers a much fuller exposition of the high
priestly activities of the reformed seminarian.

Kotkin writes:

At the
site of real and immediate tragedy, an old man comes, wielding not a sword to
protect civilization from ghastly present threats but to preach the sanctity of
California’s green religion. The Paris Climate Change Conference offers a
moment of triumph for the 77-year-old Jerry Brown, the apogee of his odd public
odyssey….

Like a
modern day Torquemada, he is warning the masses that if they fail to adhere in
all ways of the new faith or face, as he suggested recently humanity’s “extinction.”

More than many others, Brown, like a man possessed, is so
convinced of the truth of his green faith that he has no tolerance for those
who dissent:

Increasingly,
Brown has become the patron saint of climate change, while at the same time
exposing the effort’s flaws and contradictions most clearly. Railing against
the satanic greenhouse gases, Brown, one supposes unwittingly, seems
unconcerned he is waging what amounts to a war against the state’s own middle
and working classes. His intolerance of dissent—albeit less extreme than
some—reflects the current trajectory of environmentalism, which increasingly
seeks to silence and even criminalize those who dispute their
analyses and prescriptions.

Those who believe in the dogma of anthropogenic climate
change see it as the cause of everything that is going wrong in the world, from
the rise of ISIS to the war in Syria to Islamic terrorism and to the mass migration of Syrians to
Western Europe.

It's a way to shift the blame. For true believers, the deeper meaning is: I am not to blame
for any of the consequences produced by my policies:

Like a
religious adept, Brown shows his need to link everything to one sin—greenhouse
gas emissions—to explain virtually everything from wildfires to the current drought on climate change, although with little
support from scientists who study such things. As was common in the
worst aspects of the medieval Catholic church, one increasingly cannot dissent
in any way from revealed doctrine without being essentially evil.

California’s economic recovery, such as it is, seems to
vindicate Brown’s green faith. If his state can recover and become home to many
of the trendiest high tech businesses, then your state can too. Paul Krugman
and Michael Kinsley believe that California should become a role model for
strict government regulation of just about everything. They insist that
California proves that big government does not hamper economic growth.

The argument is short-sighted. Kotkin rebuts it easily:

Outsiders
think of California as a prosperous place that mints billionaires, but overall
the state’s economic recovery has done little for many, if not most, state
residents. Even with the boom in Silicon Valley, roughly one in three
Californians live check to check, the state has higher rate of poverty than Mississippi, as well asone-third of the nation’s welfare recipients. Among
the emerging Latino majority, a prime Brown constituency, the state’s cost
adjusted poverty rate is more than 33 percent compared to just 22.7 percent in
Texas, a state often derided as unenlightened and cruel.

During
this “boom,” most California blue-collar workers in farming, fishing, and forestry
have experienced actual average wage decreases. Employment in fields such
as construction and manufacturing remain well below their 2007 levels. Much of
this has to do with environmental regulation, which has raised energy costs
almost twice those of nearby competitors and also helped
raise housing prices to an unsustainable level.

The result, Kotkin continues, in a nicely turned phrase, is
that California has become “the graveyard of middle class aspirations:”

Once
the beacon of opportunity, California is becoming a graveyard of middle class
aspiration, particularly for the young. In a recent survey of states where “the
middle class is dying,” based on earning trajectories for middle-income
cohorts, Business Insider ranked California first, with shrinking middle class
earnings and the third highest proportion of wealth concentrated in the top 20
percent.

Most
hurt, though, are the poor. California is home to a remarkable 77 of the
country’s 297 most “economically challenged,” cities based on levels of
poverty and employment, according to a recent USC study; altogether these cities have a population of more
than 12 million. Some stressed cities exist cheek-to-jowl with the state’s
uber-rich—Oakland, Los Angeles, as well as Coachella, near Palm Springs. Most others are in the poorer, more heavily Latino
interior, places like Riverside, Stockton, and Vallejo. Journalists who come to
California to praise the governor may think it’s still
“California Dreamin’” but for all too many, particularly away from the coast (PDF), it’s more like The Grapes of Wrath.

The correct term for the California model, Kotkin argues, is
feudalism:

Of
course, there’s a long history of such bifurcated society, where people tend to
stay in their class and the poor depend largely on handouts from their
spiritual “ betters.” It’s called feudalism.

In many
ways, Jerry Brown is a perfect medievalist—the son of a self-made man, a person
who largely inherited his position. Without the legacy of his father, Edmund G.
“Pat” Brown, a natural politician and arguably the greatest governor in the
state’s history, it’s unlikely the shy, awkward, although unquestionably bright
kid would have been elected the first time in his mid thirties.

Naturally, politicians like Brown excel in empathy. They
feel for the poor and the disadvantaged. Unfortunately, their policies do not
fulfill thei promises:

Brown’s
acuity has often been on target, as, for example, when he took on the encrusted
bureaucracy at the University of California and inside state government. But
Brown’s maverick approach also revealed a streak that reflected a harshness
towards those who were weaker, including the poor. In his first term, Brown’s
callous treatment of the mentally ill left 30,000 mental patients in worsening
conditions in inadequate nursing facilities. As the Los Angeles director of
mental health told me at the time, under Reagan there was “genuine concern for
people” while under Brown he didn’t “see much concern for people at all.”

Kotkin next compares Brown to Savonarola, the Florentine
monk who initiated the bonfire of the vanities, a Renaissance potlatch where
people burned their most valued possessions in an ostentatious show of piety. Until
he himself was incinerated, Savonarola had discovered a primitive form of
sacrifice to assuage the anger of the gods.

The results have been detrimental to human beings:

He came
into office, recalled top aide Tom Quinn, “questioning the values of the
Democratic Party” and rejecting the “build, build, build thing” of his father.
Like the 15th century Florentine Catholic monk Girolamo Savonarola, he came to
Sacramento, in part, to rid it of suberbia and
luxuria. Most important,
he did not restart the infrastructure building, most portentously for water storage, that marked his father’s regime; the
severity of the drought and the awful condition of the state’s roads are, to
some extent, his legacy.

How has Brown put together a durable political coalition? He
has done so by cultivating the tech oligarchs, the Hollywood elites and the labor
unions:

Early
on Brown cleverly cultivated the emerging tech oligarchy in Silicon Valley.
This has created a new class of major donors who, along with the unions and Hollywood,
have financed his political re-ascendency.

The
oligarchs seem kindred souls for Brown, with little patience for less advanced
beings. He also knew that their success has allowed him to show economic gains
without having to concede to the regulatory concerns of more traditional
industries. In the new Silicon Valley, most of the “dirty work” is shoved off
to other more benighted states, or abroad; regulatory overreach poses only
limited problems. For his part, Brown sees the oligarchs as the state’s
economic foundation. “We’ve got a few problems, we have lots of little burdens
and regulations and taxes,” he said recently, “but smart people figure out how
to make it.”

High tech is clean work. It is mind work. It is purer than
thou. It does not pollute the earth or the atmosphere. And yet, all of the
support services that allow the high tech industry to pretend to moral
superiority-- the dirty work, as it happens-- have been outsourced to places
that pollute far more than anywhere else. Some places have welcomed the
business:

Indeed,
as one recent study found, California could literally disappear tomorrow
with virtually no effect on the climate. Perhaps less recognized, its efforts
to reduce emissions have accounted for naught, since so much industry and so
many people—some 2 million in the last decade—have taken their carbon
footprint elsewhere, usually to places where climate and less stringent
regulation allow for greater emissions. Some states, rather than embrace Brown’s formula and seeing an
opportunity to score, have detached themselves from renewable mandates
entirely.

Kotkin concludes that it’s mostly about moral posturing,
about showing oneself to be morally superior to the mass of common humanity. The purpose of the posturing is to persuade people that you should be making their decisions for them:

So why
the dogged insistence on draconian policies? It’s very much for the same reason
people take priestly vows, or why penitents whip themselves: moral posturing
before the rest of the world and, for politicians, the prospect of attracting
the adoring masses (or at least the media).

Where will it end? More importantly, how will the new green
policies affect the current economy and the standard of living for everyday
people:

What
will be Brown’s main legacy? A more environmental pure but severely bifurcated
California and, if he and his compatriots have their way, an accelerating
decline of the Western world and arguably the stagnation of the entire world
economy. But Brown and his crony capitalist and priestly friends will be happy.
They may have messed up the world, but they will always have Paris.

2 comments:

You can add Bill Nye the Science Guy as another high priest:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtW2rrLHs08 Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye, National Geographic

Myself, I'm not against the climate science, and I don't believe in shooting the messenger, but what do we do with the problem of despair? Apparently we have to lie.

Bill Nye @3:35-4:00: "Although these consequences can be climate threatening, scientists still believe there are things we can do at a personal level to help: Recycle and reuse things, walk or use public transportation to get to work, turn off your electronics when you're not using them, eat less meat. And while you're at it eat more locally grown vegetables and food. And last but not least, spread your knowledge about climate change to others."

If Bill was serious he'd give the real depressing answer in this new eco-religion:http://green.blogs.nytimes.com//2009/08/07/having-children-brings-high-carbon-impact/-------------Having children is the surest way to send your carbon footprint soaring, according to a new study from statisticians at Oregon State University.

The study found that having a child has an impact that far outweighs that of other energy-saving behaviors.

Take, for example, a hypothetical American woman who switches to a more fuel-efficient car, drives less, recycles, installs more efficient light bulbs, and replaces her refrigerator and windows with energy-saving models. If she had two children, the researchers found, her carbon legacy would eventually rise to nearly 40 times what she had saved by those actions.

“Clearly, the potential savings from reduced reproduction are huge compared to the savings that can be achieved by changes in lifestyle,” the report states.

The impact of children varies dramatically depending on geography: An American woman who has a baby will generate nearly seven times the carbon footprint of that of a Chinese woman who has a child, the study found.-------------

In the olden days the sins of your ancestors were your sins too. Now we are the ancestors to our potential children and their children, passing our bad habit of turning oil into food to the next generation.

So this new religion ideally should have no children, and they can devote their energies helping other people raise their children, so they also will join the religion and have no children.

And it looks like Japan will be the epicenter of this new religion of voluntary population decline and a renewed hatred of nuclear power. It's a brave new world with a steep learning curve ahead. Can you age away a whole culture with respect dignity?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan ------The ageing of Japan is thought to outweigh all other nations, as the country is purported to have the highest proportion of elderly citizens; 33.0% are above age 60, 25.9% are aged 65 or above, 12.5% aged 75 or above, as of September 2014.------

Well, let's see. Is anything/any place/any area more than 60 miles from the coastline doing OK? Given there's a lot of that, and it's desert or dry, and the reservoirs built before 1950 were predicated on a much lower population, my guess is NO. And my 60-miles number is because I used to live in Riverside, and that's maybe 15-30 miles too many.